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- The Product Model #272 - How to Run An Effective Quarterly Planning Session For Empowered Teams
The Product Model #272 - How to Run An Effective Quarterly Planning Session For Empowered Teams
This Week’s Updates: Off Vibe Leadership, Product-Centricity, The Horse Problem, AI-Product Success, Agentic-AI Security and more...

How To Run An Effective Quarterly Planning Session For Empowered Teams
Quarterly planning sessions can lead to an output focus. We need to ensure that we balance the needs of alignment (ensuring that teams work on the highest priority business areas) with autonomy (teams decide what to build).
To do this, Product Teams need to reiterate the vision and strategy for the product, along with the current risk appetite - do they want Stream Teams to take big bets or smaller, more conservative steps?
Planning should start with Stream Teams setting suggested targets for their streams. Product Teams should then challenge the Stream Teams to ensure that they have done the necessary upfront research and due diligence so that they have a chance of meeting their targets.
Like all processes, there are additional challenges as well. I go into more detail about them in my article below.
Do you set outcome targets or output targets in your quarterly planning? |
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